Up and on the trail by 9:30—a pretty impressive feat for us considering the size of the group and unfamiliarity with each other. The trail starts out as a gentle climb through the woods for the first ½ mile but it doesn’t take long for us to figure out that Tom is in much better shape than we are. After talking with him a while, we found out he’s a hardcore cyclist and rides 25 miles every day during the week before he does his real workouts on the weekends. I wish we could use the excuse that Brad and I are engineers so we have a natural disinclination to exercise but this doesn’t hold true since Tom is also an engineer. We’ll have to settle for the fact that we are electrical engineers and are required to spend much longer hours working to correct all the problems that the mechanicals create resulting in reduced exercise time availability. Tom is mechanical; mystery solved.
Once we emerge from the woods we come into a flower filled valley like I’ve never seen. Crested Butte is the home of an annual wild flower festival every year which Pam and her family have been coming to for over 30 years. This year’s festival was last week but it was rainy. This is the first chance for a sunny week so it looks like we’re getting the flowers at peak time. It’s beautiful and sun shiny so I’m not happy. I don’t like hiking in full sun without shade and the approach trail to the four pass loop is 3 miles of all sun. Add in that we’ve only been at elevation for one day and two nights and we’re not really acclimated yet.
The hiking order is quickly established: Tom is way out front cruising (Tom and Joan have been in Colorado for a week already to buy a retirement piece of real estate), Joan and Pam are next in line, with Brad and me pulling up the rear. Pam and Joan are excited about all the flowers and haven’t seen each other for almost a year so there is a lot of clucking in front of us. They may have thought Brad and I were dragging but, in reality, we were just trying to drop back far enough to get a little quiet and take in nature (that’s my story and I’m sticking with it).
At 3.5 miles we actually join the trail. We have chosen to do the trail in a clockwise loop. We can see the back side of West Maroon Pass to our right but we choose to go left (only after we eat our lunch). The elevation where we join the main trail is already about 11,700’ and Frigid Air Pass is the lowest pass at only 12,415’. The valley between West Maroon and Frigid Air has no trees at all. Fortunately it’s only about 2 more miles to the pass.
We stopped as a group for a snack before tackling the pass. We can see snow to our left as we turn to head up. I decided I was going to keep up with Tom as we made the final climb up the pass (about 300’ in the last ¼ mile) and I could have done it if some young kids hadn’t passed us up. Tom is like my ex-father-in-law on the interstate; he doesn’t mind driving slow, but he can’t stand to have anyone pass him. Tom turned to me and said “Let’s show them what a couple of old guys can do” and, boom, he was gone. I tried to keep up for a few more steps and then decided the only thing this old guy could show them is how to have a massive coronary on a mountain side so I throttled back to my normal pace.
That little push cost me bad. The last time I was hiking over 12,000’ I had been hiking for over a week on the way up there and was well acclimated—not so this time. I had spent all my reserves for that little testosterone episode. As we hiked down the pass, I kept dropping further and further back. Tom and Joan were almost ¼ mile ahead of us when they got to the first snow pack. Pam had decided to slow down and hike with Brad and me for a while. I think she might have been slightly concerned about me since I still haven’t created a will which gives her a vested interest to make sure I survive these little trips.
When we finally got to a section of woods, we were all dead (by we, I mean Brad, Pam, and me). Tom still had his afterburners open full bore. He saw the first campsite was closed for recovery and he rocketed on down the hill. We mutinied and said we were stopping. Just below the closed campsite was another crappy, but established site. Joan dropped her pack and started running down the trail to retrieve Tom. By the time she caught up with him, he had made it another ½ mile down to the creek. They came back up and were very apologetic. We should have discussed our plans a little bit better in advance. If there had been trees, we would have stopped before the pass just for the acclimation.
Even though the site was very slanted, we didn’t care. There were seats around a fire ring and a nearby creek so we had all we needed. We cooked supper and got ready for bed. Brad had a cigar and offered all around, but with the way I was breathing, additional lung damage was not on the menu for the night. We did help him lighten his M&M load. No campfire tonight, just bed. I thought I heard Brad crying in disappointment from his tent.
